For today’s blogpost I’m going to try something new. It was requested by a reader of this blog, which for anonymity’s sake, I’ll call P. For those who live a busy life, prefer audio over text, or just find my font choice appalling, I thought I’d record myself reading the below text. Think of it like the audiobook version of this essay.
If you love or hate this format, I’d love to hear what you think. Feel free to comment below, or DM me across any of my channels. Any and all feedback welcome with open arms.
And thank you for inspiring me, P!
Two weeks ago, I happened to write about saying “yes” to more things. But what do you say “yes” to?
Over the years, I’ve used many different versions of the question: What would you do if you knew you would fail? Or, What would you do regardless of the outcome of the endeavor? And as long as the reason for doing so contains any combination of:
- Skill acquisition
- Invaluable experience
- Or relationship/friendship that I value more than the project itself
… it’s a “Yes” for me. The “Yes” becomes an exploration of depth. An optimization strategy for my strengths. My superpowers. It’s something I learned from quite a few of my mentors over the years – both in an official and unofficial capacity.
Subsequently, I’ve had this belief for a long time, which will probably cause some uproar somewhere, that we shouldn’t optimize our life around reducing our weaknesses. But rather, focus our time on maximizing our strengths. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ever work to ameliorate our incompetencies. But:
- Just enough that we meaningfully reduce our risk of ruin. Any more, there are diminishing returns over time. Forgiving my esoteric economic jargon, we should only work on our weaknesses so that we don’t lose our ability to survive. For example, if you don’t know how to cook, you shouldn’t aim to be the best Michelin-starred chef in the world, but just enough so that you don’t starve to death. Assuming your goal in life isn’t in the culinary world.
- Mitigate our weaknesses that are the most adjacent to our core strengths. For instance, in my opinion, one of my greatest relative strengths is my ability to ask questions. I am by no means the best, but compared to the rest of my skills, this is one I find myself shining in a bit more than my peers. Which effectively meant I was always interested in what others were up to and how they thought. A mentor figure told me years ago that it didn’t matter how interested I was in others, no one had a reason to be interested in me. Which meant that one of my greatest and most adjacent weaknesses was to be interesting.
People who have superpowers often carry super-weaknesses. The greater their superpower, usually the greater their weakness. Humans aren’t great multitaskers. We were never designed to be. If you’re saying yes to one thing, you’re saying no to a hundred other things. Are you willing to shoulder that opportunity cost? Sometimes you are, but be very deliberate about it.
Fairly recently, I was presenting to an amazing cast of board members in a board meeting. There was a general consensus around the fact that we lacked focus as an organization, yet we were sitting on a wealth of talent. To which, one of our board members redirected us to Steve Jobs’ infamous speech when we returned to Apple in 1997. One line in particular stood out to me: “Apple is executing wonderfully on many of the wrong things.“
He follows up to say: “The ability of the organization to execute is really high though. I mean, I’ve met some extraordinary people at Apple. There’s a lot of great people at Apple. They’re doing some of the wrong things because the plan has been wrong.”
Taking a step back, as humans, as working professionals, as entrepreneurs in each and every one of our own rights, we often “execute wonderfully on many of the wrong things.” Often times, that’s on our own weaknesses, rather than our strengths.
Living in a simulation
Imagine that we live in a simulation – an MMORPG. Or, massively multiplayer online role-playing game. We start off with a finite number of stat points. The starting number of stat points varies from person to person, depending on your socio-economic class and your given genetic code. You can allocate those stat points however you want.
You can spread them all out evenly, where you’ll never have any true weakness, but neither any true strength. You’ve hedged your risk of ruin. It’s going to be really hard for you to lose, but you can never really win.
On the flip side of the token, you can minmax your build, using gaming terminology. Double down on a stat, to achieve the equivalent of a superpower, compared to your peers. But often times, if you are maximizing on a superpower, you’ve minimized your proficiency in another area. Luckily, as in any game, and as in reality, you can pick up tools and make friendships along the way that will supplement your weaknesses with their strengths.
Of course, as all analogies go, there are exceptions. But as far as I know, there are far fewer exceptions than those that fit into this analogy. And, technically, our ability to level up is infinite. The only upper limit is that, like everyone else, we have 24 hours in a day and a finite number of years to live.
So, where am I going with this?
Super-tools for (super)weaknesses
What do you not want or don’t care to have a superpower in? For the skills and tasks you use everyday, but don’t care to be the best in the world for, leverage software and tools to automate your work, so you only need to spend the minimal amount of time or energy to make sure it doesn’t become a stressor for your day. In the above gaming analogy, you use items to compensate for specific stat deficiencies. The more efficient the “item”/tool, the less energy you need to expend to make up for a super-weakness.
Here are the tools I use to supercharge my day, so I can spend more time enhancing my superpowers and less time mitigating my super-weaknesses.
Descript
Descript makes me feel like a god. As much as I love Adobe Premiere Pro, it had an incredibly high learning curve. But once you got it, they have some of the most robust tools on the market. On Descript, I love how I can edit an audio or video clip just by deleting words in the transcript. And if I mess up, and I do quite a bit, I can always voiceover in the editing process to make myself sound smarter than I actually am. Even better, I can drag and drop music, video and sound effects. If you’re listening to the audio version of this essay, you might have noticed I don’t have any of the afore-mentioned effects. The goal here was just to get you my thoughts as quickly as possible, without trapping myself in audio perfectionism.
If the Adobe Creative Suite is the endgame, Descript is the early game. And it helps you ace it remarkably well.
Notion
Notion is a dark horse (for me). I’ve seen startup data rooms, personal blogs, internal wikis, and even VC investment theses and fund strategies being produced on Notion. It always seemed like a nice-to-have. In all fairness, I didn’t give it the benefit of the doubt it deserved until late last year. Its greatest ability isn’t the ability to create a robust website or the prettiest blog. Its greatest ability is that it gets people to put ideas and thoughts on paper as quickly as possible. The barrier to entry is so low that its greatest competitors are note-taking apps, like Evernote or Google Keep, for early users. Then, you can go from notes to fully functional site in minutes.
And ever since, I’ve been a geek over it. There’s this great thread on Twitter by @empirepowder about all the applications you can build using Notion extremely quickly – from creating a blog from scratch to publishing a course to tracking analytics on your page to the ultimate tweet tracking tool.
For many of us, the hardest part about doing anything is starting. Notion solves that.
Undock
Take scheduling as another example. I know very few people, if at all, who want to be the best scheduler in the world. I know I don’t. But I find myself spending an undeserving amount of time trying to schedule meetings, rather than actually having meetings or being productive. Enter Undock. “The fastest way to find time to meet with anyone.” That’s from their website. And it’s true. When I’m in my Gmail scheduling calls/meetings with founders or investors, I never leave my email tab nor do I ever touch my mouse. No matter how many people are on the email thread, I can find time for a meeting, on average, in two seconds. That’s no joke. I timed myself.
Having and empowering others to have superpowers is literally in their DNA.
Superhuman
I’ve heard many great things about Superhuman, and about a quarter as many bad things about the platform. Superhuman’s claim to fame is being able to get you to inbox zero via one of the most seamless and fastest email experiences ever – through shortcut keys, follow-up reminders, and social media insights just to name a few. Their user interface makes it incredibly easy to respond from one email to the next, even when you’re offline. They have this 100ms rule, where every interaction should be faster than 100ms to make communication feel instantaneous. And they do deliver.
Many of its customers include investors and founders. Busy people who have more unread emails in their inbox than they care to count. Most of the bad reviews I hear from friends and colleagues are that $30/month is just too expensive.
There are many ways to look at the $30 price tag. It’s $12 more than Netflix’s premium plan, and Netflix serves you new content you might not have access to otherwise. Superhuman serves you the same content that would have been yours anyway, just in a new light. On the flip side, $30/month is $1/day. Less than a cup of coffee a day, assuming you buy your coffee every day. But even if you only bought $3 coffee twice a week, $30/month would still be cheaper.
Or in a different lens, Superhuman’s core audience – founders, investors, busy people who have hundreds of emails a week, if not a day – their time is worth at or more than $30/hour. So, if on a 160-work month, Superhuman collectively saves their customers more than an hour of time every month, then it’s worth it to them.
The way I look at it, it’s a bargain. But I don’t use it. Why? It’s not because it’s too expensive. Neither because I don’t have enough emails to go through. But rather, I happened to optimize my email workflow before I even heard of Superhuman. I’ll save that topic for a later blogpost. But if you don’t have a way to get to inbox zero (unless you don’t care. I have a number of friends who have tens of thousands of unread in their inbox. That scares me)… but if you do care about the piling mound of emails, Superhuman’s really got it in the bag.
In closing
And maybe this post might serve helpful in reframing on how you can live your most optimal life. Supercharge your strengths. And find the best tools and mental models you can to protect your downside. It’s okay if you’re not the best at the latter; you don’t have to be.
I mentioned a few of the tools I use, but your mileage may and probably should vary.
While there are tools out there that supercharge your ability to execute and perform, equally so, you’ll find there are amazing people out there that complement your weaknesses. Friends, colleagues, co-founders, life partners. In the words of Steve Jobs, find and meet “extraordinary people.” To do so, as my mentor told me, you’ll have to be interested and interesting.
Stay openminded and stay frosty out there!
Photo by Cláudio Luiz Castro on Unsplash
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